My Visions of the Future

As a young person, I was not the picture of perfect health. In fact, you might say I was “cursed” with bad health. I was plagued with constant sinus problems. Except on rare occasions, I was unable to breathe through my nose for the first twenty years of my life. Colds, sore throats, bronchitis and sinus headaches were frequent and hard to shake in spite of the continuous doses of penicillin I received. I was physically weak, awkward and uncoordinated. When we ran in elementary school, I came in dead last. Every girl in the school could run faster than I could.

My quest for healing was a spiritual journey, which began when I was fifteen years old. I had been studying plants in the wilds to earn my nature merit badge, the last badge I needed to complete my requirements to become an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America. I had decided to study plants because, unlike birds and other animals, they held still while you looked them up in the book.

Fortunately, my wildflower book, A Field Guide to Rocky Mountain Wildflowers, included "Interesting Facts" about the various plants I was learning to identify. It frequently told how these plants were used by the American Indians for medicines, dyes, fibers and food.

One June day, I was camping in the mountains near my home in Salt Lake City. I had just cooked and eaten stinging nettles for the first time. Sitting on a rock, I was thinking about the many uses the Native Americans had made of the plants around me. “This one had been used to create a dye, that one had been used for medicine and the one over there had been used for food.”

Suddenly, a voice spoke, not from inside my head, but from inside my heart. The voice said, "If you were a loving God, wouldn't you have provided everything naturally upon the face of the earth to keep your children healthy and strong?"

This question caused some reflection. I was being raised in a devout religious family, a fifth generation descendent of Mormon pioneers, who had crossed the plains and settled in the Salt Lake valley to pursue the right to worship God as their conscience dictated. So, I believed there was a loving God who was the Father of all mankind, but t hat question, asked by the still, small voice within made me realize that millions of people lived and died on the earth before modern medicine was developed.

Upon further reflection, I also realized that the expensive technology of modern medicine was out of reach of millions of people now living upon the earth. Had God made the world in such a way that only a small percentage of people living in modern times could enjoy proper health care? I could not see how this could be the case.

My reasoning continued; God had infinite foreknowledge, so He would have known that his children would be afflicted with various diseases in their mortal life. If He truly loved all His children, then wouldn't He have provided means for them to find relief from these afflictions? After these reflections, I concluded, "If I were God, I would have placed a plant upon the earth to heal every disease which my children could be afflicted with, regardless of their wealth or technological advancement."

That was an interesting awakening, but it is not the main point I want to write about here. What I want to focus on is what I was told next, which is found on the next page of this article.